Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and not be afraid: for the Lord JEHOVAH is my strength and my song; he also is become my salvation. Therefore with joy shall ye draw water out of the wells of salvation.-Isaiah 12 2-3

Monday, August 6, 2012

July 30, 2012

"Yep, I speak English!" "Oh my gosh! You're such a
silly billy!"

July 30, 2012

Hey there everyone!

Gosh, it's been an interesting week, the highlight of it being the
visa trip to Kiev! We were able to go to the temple and to almost everything
since we had something like a 7 hour lay over in Kiev! Pretty darn cool!
Flights are always one of my most favorite things on visa trips too because you
almost always sit with really interesting people. In past trips I've met people
who've given me Kazakstanian money, who have asked me to translate poetry from
English to Russian and who have taught me to meditate, so I always look forward
to what cool people I'd be meeting on these flights. My favorite flight, this
time around, happened when I sat next to a 6 year old kid and her mom. The
kid's name was Sophia and her Russian was pretty hard to understand, and her
mom was constantly correcting her. When I told her mom my name and who she was
she was super surprised and said that she lived in New York and knew English.
Sophia was acting like a hooligan and didn't hear the conversation, but I came
to find out that Sophia knew English a hundred times better than Russian (hence
why her Russian was super not understandable). So, I said "Hey
there!" to Sophia and she stopped and stared at me. "You speak English?"
The rest of the plane ride was spent with her telling me all about school and
her family and the games she liked to play on her 3DS along with drawing me a
picture of a butterfly which is my new bookmark for my Book of Mormon! Pretty
darn awesome plane ride. She said funny things like "see you later
alligator!" which I haven't heard in forever. Pretty sweet!

In the temple I met a couple of way cool people too. There was a
returned sister missionary, Sister Bragonets, from Ukraine doing baptisms in
the temple, so that was way fun to see her. And, as it turns out, the parents
of one of my favorite religion teachers, Brother Black, were serving in the
temple! They just barely started their temple mission it sounds like and
they're from Rexburg Idaho, so of course we had a pretty instant spark of
friendship there! Amazing to think of the people you meet in the temple! :)

We were gone for most of the week, so not a whole lot happened new
in respects to the work. We have an investigator who we're anticipating will be
baptized on the 11th of August, so we're getting her all prepared! In addition,
we found out that this upcoming Sunday President Sartori, my mission president,
will be coming to our little branch next week, so woo hoo! The only thing that
makes me nervous is that most likely I'll be translating for him. I've
translated a good number of times before, but never before for him, and
sometimes I hear he likes to use big words, so we'll see how it goes! I bet
it'll all go just fine though :)

That was a bummer to hear about Mer, but it's way good that she's
got herself a new place to be at and that things are going better. Were you
already planning on making that trip, or was it a kind of bonzai trip there?
Pretty sweet that we live so close to her so as to be able to come down
relatively quickly to help.

I have a favor to ask, if it's not too much trouble. One of my best
friends from back at BYU-I is serving her mission in the California Roseville
mission (English speaking). In the past few weeks I received 2 letters from her
(and while on my visa trip I got one more!) and I sent her a reply just barely
a week ago. If you could send her a dearelder telling her that I got her
letters just fine and that I sent her a letter back that'd be great (to give
her a time frame, she dated her last letter on June 20th and I got it on
Thursday, thought it's always random when and how I get letters anyways, but at
least as a time frame it's a good counter) . It sounds like it may be a bit
rough right now, and though she already knows it, if you could pass on a
"Good luck out there! You're awesome! Love you lots!" from me, that'd
be great! Anything else you'd like to add would be just fine too :)

Think that wraps it up this week, so I'll let this go. Thanks a
bunch! I love you all a ton. Things are going well, and I hope everythings
going well there too :)